Chinese smartphone makers are known for being far ahead in the fast charging development race – it’s a number that is worth some proper bragging rights when it comes to marketing phones with such technologies. Realme, a sister brand of Oppo, vivo, and OnePlus, has once again retook the lead from Xiaomi and showcased a staggeringly fast 320W charging that completes a full charge of the 4,420mAh battery in just 4 minutes and 30 seconds.
Realme Goes Real Fast
The company branded the technology as ‘320W SUPERSONIC charge’, which succeeds the current-generation 240W FlashCharge that fills up a battery in just 9 and a half minutes (it is commercially available in the realme GT Neo 5 smartphone, which has 4,600mAh battery). The 320W solution is aimed at rivaling Xiaomi’s 300W tech demonstrated last year, which completes the charge in 5 minutes (though the battery is a fair bit smaller at just 4,100mAh). In the same run, Realme’s charger can hit 26% after 60 seconds, and “over 50%” in “less than two minutes.”
So what’s the tech behind this blazingly-fast charging speeds? For one, Realme has crammed a further 80 watts into a similarly-sized charger as the 240W unit, and they gave it a nickname called “Pocket Cannon.” To make this charger just a bit more usable, it also comes with two USB-C ports that supplies 150W and 65W simultaneously – the former is for realme smartphones, while the latter is for laptops. Talk about preferential treatment.
Another tech comes from the battery itself. To make charging faster, engineers has took the route of splitting batteries into multiple cells, which provides parallel charging that can drastically cut down charging times. Most smartphones capable of high-speed fast charging adopt dual-cell designs; but realme’s 320W solution uses a quad-cell design that folds in half, and each cell is only 3mm thick. Additionally, a special voltage transformer is also used to deliver around 98% of power conversion efficiency.
It’s worth noting that this is still a demonstration so far – no phones were specifically announced to feature this charging tech. Still, it’s only a matter of time before this gets commercialized, so you may hear about it pretty soon.
Source: The Verge, realme press release
Pokdepinion: And here’s my laptop that “only” has a 240W charging brick…
